Think of Your Brand as Batter, not Butter
I recently went to a networking event at a southern soul food restaurant. The chef and owner put out a delicious buffet for guests to enjoy, which included homemade biscuits. As I enjoyed one of the soft, buttery biscuits, oddly enough, it made me think about branding. How so, you ask?
For your brand to have maximum positive impact and influence, it needs to be integrated through your business. We like to speak with clients about putting your brand “into” their business, rather than just “onto” their business. One approach feels strategic and leads to cohesiveness and consistency. The other feels chaotic or haphazard. One creates alignment and clarity, one undermines it. One builds trust and credibility and the other doesn’t.
One thing I’ve noticed recently is that brands that have endured COVID, downturns, unrest etc. are conscious of the brand they were building from the beginning, while allowing room to evolve and even pivot. This is a winning plan.
I recently spoke with a legal professional with expertise in estate planning. This person has successfully moved from practicing into writing, and now coaching. She has long had a strategic focus on legacy, which was the anchor for her business and created room for evolution and expansion.
You can be strategic and thoughtful in your planning, ensuring your business and brand are represented and reflected at every turn and touchpoint of your practice. The alternative is you can be haphazard, scattered, sporadic, adding in branding or creative.
If biscuits are not your thing, think of it this way. How your brand is positioned and perceived is a reflection of choices made in the brand-building process. There are two approaches you can take. One approach is what we might call a layered approach, and the other we might call a littered approach. Doing this right requires time, detail, consistency, and effort. Your brand is a reflection, the culmination of your choices.
Putting your brand on your business: the butter approach
This approach can show up in many ways. Perhaps your brand looks like it is not updated often enough, or it can look like it is updated too much. There is no rhyme or reason or rationale for changes. The pieces don’t make a whole. It feels like parts, and not a whole — individual ingredients, but not a dish.
It feels like things were added over time — but never organized, never edited, never intentionally arranged. There is an element of your brand that should look and feel constructed. The way something looks (or sounds) creates emotions. This is why we refer to our impression of a brand’s identity as its “look and feel” – we inherently recognize the power of brands to evoke and elicit emotions.
In the same way I feel inherently stressed and disoriented when my son’s toys are scattered throughout the living room, a brand that is not properly organized causes stress and uncertainty.
Organization aids orientation. If you want people to feel a sense of structure, order and the confidence and credibility that comes from that — it starts with how you present your brand.
Like ingredients in the kitchen before mixing, your brand elements may be scattered across platforms, departments, and touchpoints. The result? Confusion. And a lack of clarity, consistency and credibility.
Clients may not even be able to articulate what feels “off” to them, but they will sense it. Even without an art degree or a creative focus, they can sense disorder and a lack of intentionality that shows up.
Clarity benefits credibility. The more put together your brand feels, the more trustworthy you are perceived. Typos, stray marks and phrases all undermine credibility.
Putting your brand in your business, not just on it: The batter (and better) approach
This is about putting the butter in the dough, not just on the top as an extra or afterthought. Your brand goes in your business, not just “on” your business.
Your brand functions as a system, not silos, and everything has place, purpose, and because of that, it has power. Picture yourself with a well-developed brand that is conceived, constructed, and conveyed thoughtfully, and artfully. This reflects a series of decisions and choices. This doesn’t have to mean complicated. It means coherent and cohesive.
Integrating your brand into your business starts with how you fundamentally structure some fundamental elements of your business, from process to people. It is reinforced internally and is reflected externally through your brand’s expression and experience.
How Your Brand is Expressed
Like batter, integrating your brand is not just the raw materials, it is how you artfully blend and mix them together. Some of these core ingredients for your brand are what we can call the 5 P’s: Purpose, Promise, Position, (Value) Proposition, and People. These elements help establish who you are, why you do what you do, why it matters, and how you deliver value to your clients. If you don’t declare who you are, the market will guess, and you don’t want to leave them to try to guess (or make up an answer for you). This also introduces risk which can be costly to your brand and business. While it’s true you can’t control it, you are the biggest influence in how you are perceived.
How Your Brand is Experienced
When it comes to how your brand is experienced, one important thing is the need to think of and build your brand as a system. This means having a holistic understanding of how your brand is engaged with by clients and others (competitors, partners, prospects, etc. Your brand is as much as what you say (verbal – core messaging + story) as it is what you show (visual – typography, visual identity, space and scale). These elements must look, sound, and feel in concert, not conflict. A baked good can have the right ingredients, but if they are poorly mixed, the end result will not be good.
This is where your brand either elevates or unravels. Every touchpoint, even the ones that don’t seem really connected to your brand, have an opportunity to influence and impact how your brand is expressed and experienced. A few examples include:
- Client management and onboarding process
- Internal document messaging and design
- Personal brand style and relationship building
The strongest brands thoughtfully layer consistency into how they operate and how they show up. In the same way flavor is experienced in every bite, thoughtfulness and clarity is communicated in every point of contact.
How do you build a brand that is like batter and not butter?
Layering requires discipline, and it shows up in a couple of ways.
Curating and Creating
Not everything you’ve created deserves to stay. Layered brands are curated brands. Putting your brand into your business is about creating and curating. It’s as much about what you decide to edit or eliminate as it is about what you add. Layering is often subtractive before it’s additive and you may have to cut more than you paste.
This involves asking hard questions, oftentimes of others, including within your organization. These questions are often related to alignment and clarity and can include things like “Does this strategy/partnership make sense for who we are?” or “Does this message or position feel/sound/look like us?” If not, then changes may need to be made. This aspect of creating an integrated brand examines what are the essentials, and what are the extras.
Repetition and Restraint
Creating an integrated, layered brand happens through consistency over time. Your brand builds equity in the hearts and minds of your audience through repetition. This means doing the simple and sustainable things over and over, and becoming a master of your message and market. Returning to food again, it’s helpful to think about restaurants. Beloved restaurants and recipes deliver the same quality experience people know, like and trust every time. There is a discipline to delivering your brand this way. You also can’t rush the process. If you take a cake out before it’s ready, you ruin both the presentation and experience.
Conclusion
Think of your brand as batter, not butter. It should go in and through your business, not just on it or added in later after the fact. The strongest brands aren’t created by spreading something attractive on the surface. They are built by thoughtfully mixing expression and experience throughout the entire business. The flavor is baked in and the results are consistent and cohesive.
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Enthuse Creative is a strategic branding and creative studio that helps businesses and nonprofits ensure their brand is “in” their business and not just “on” it. Contact us today to learn how we can support your organization.
